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First, some background:
The old show "Sentinel", for those of you who don't know, is about a cop who has highly developed senses (hearing/vision/touch/taste/smell) as well as various mystical senses and is thus called a Sentinel. An anthropology grad student helps him deal with the sense without getting overwhelmed and be able to use them to their best ability to catch the bad guy of the week, and is thus called a Guide. All of this is done while trying to keep the fact of the sense a secret so as to avoid government laboratories. There's a lot of stress on the Sentinel needing a Guide.
Within the Sentinel fandom, there's a fairly popular genre of alternate universe stories, in which Sentinels and Guides are well known and quite useful resources. The fandom likes to deal with power issues and whether the Sentinels should subjugate the Guides or vise versa. However, regardless of the way the power goes, it's generally a theme that one of them can demand the presence of the other, even from society at large. There's even more stress on the two being bound together by uber mystical bindings.
So I have this idea in my head of a Stargate: Atlantis fusion with this alternate Sentinel universe.
There's Rodney McKay who's gung ho to go to Atlantis, and create the grand unified theory of everything. However, he needs the right people to get it done and he wants Radek Zelenka on his staff. Zelenka, unfortunately, has revolutionary ties and does not pass the background check. Rodney gets a bit pissy about this, then has the brilliant idea of declaring that he is a Sentinel and Zelenka is his Guide, thus Zelenka must be allowed to go with.
While this is patently a ploy to get his way, the government licensing agents for Sentinels come, Rodney passes all of their tests and nobody can figure out how he's cheating. (He is after all, brilliant.) They already knew, of course, that he had various allergies, and he says he never zones because he is brilliant and always thinking of too many things to ever zone on just one, especially something as trivial as a physical sense. And he says he has no problem with geographic boundaries because he's an astrophysicist and clearly his territory is the rest of the galaxy.
Zelenka is equally clearly not a guide, but this is even easier to fake because no one has ever developed a perfect way to identify guides.
Finally the government agents throw up their hands and say, fine, he can take Zelenka but if Zelenka is supposed to be his guide, then Rodney will have to be responsible for any security breaches he causes.
Rodney smirks triumphantly.
Meanwhile John Sheppard is a guide and has gone through life perfectly happy to hide that fact. He wants to fly planes and that's not really a good job for someone who's expected to be part of a duo.
Then they both get to Atlantis and John realizes that the way Rodney was faking being a Sentinel was that he wasn't faking. He is, in fact a Sentinel who was just more interested in the extremes of physics than in anything even his hyper senses could tell him.
They were both perfectly happy going through life as they were, until, of course, they are trapped together in a closed society on Atlantis, both of them needing every last skill they each possess and more to keep alive.
While, of course, never letting on that John's the Guide rather than Zelenka.
The old show "Sentinel", for those of you who don't know, is about a cop who has highly developed senses (hearing/vision/touch/taste/smell) as well as various mystical senses and is thus called a Sentinel. An anthropology grad student helps him deal with the sense without getting overwhelmed and be able to use them to their best ability to catch the bad guy of the week, and is thus called a Guide. All of this is done while trying to keep the fact of the sense a secret so as to avoid government laboratories. There's a lot of stress on the Sentinel needing a Guide.
Within the Sentinel fandom, there's a fairly popular genre of alternate universe stories, in which Sentinels and Guides are well known and quite useful resources. The fandom likes to deal with power issues and whether the Sentinels should subjugate the Guides or vise versa. However, regardless of the way the power goes, it's generally a theme that one of them can demand the presence of the other, even from society at large. There's even more stress on the two being bound together by uber mystical bindings.
So I have this idea in my head of a Stargate: Atlantis fusion with this alternate Sentinel universe.
There's Rodney McKay who's gung ho to go to Atlantis, and create the grand unified theory of everything. However, he needs the right people to get it done and he wants Radek Zelenka on his staff. Zelenka, unfortunately, has revolutionary ties and does not pass the background check. Rodney gets a bit pissy about this, then has the brilliant idea of declaring that he is a Sentinel and Zelenka is his Guide, thus Zelenka must be allowed to go with.
While this is patently a ploy to get his way, the government licensing agents for Sentinels come, Rodney passes all of their tests and nobody can figure out how he's cheating. (He is after all, brilliant.) They already knew, of course, that he had various allergies, and he says he never zones because he is brilliant and always thinking of too many things to ever zone on just one, especially something as trivial as a physical sense. And he says he has no problem with geographic boundaries because he's an astrophysicist and clearly his territory is the rest of the galaxy.
Zelenka is equally clearly not a guide, but this is even easier to fake because no one has ever developed a perfect way to identify guides.
Finally the government agents throw up their hands and say, fine, he can take Zelenka but if Zelenka is supposed to be his guide, then Rodney will have to be responsible for any security breaches he causes.
Rodney smirks triumphantly.
Meanwhile John Sheppard is a guide and has gone through life perfectly happy to hide that fact. He wants to fly planes and that's not really a good job for someone who's expected to be part of a duo.
Then they both get to Atlantis and John realizes that the way Rodney was faking being a Sentinel was that he wasn't faking. He is, in fact a Sentinel who was just more interested in the extremes of physics than in anything even his hyper senses could tell him.
They were both perfectly happy going through life as they were, until, of course, they are trapped together in a closed society on Atlantis, both of them needing every last skill they each possess and more to keep alive.
While, of course, never letting on that John's the Guide rather than Zelenka.
